“Enactive Virtuality – Conceptualizing the dynamics of narrative cognition”

Speaker's bio:

Pia Tikka is a professional filmmaker and an EU Mobilitas research professor at the Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School and MEDIT Centre of Excellence, Tallinn University. She has directed the fiction films Daughters of Yemanjá, Sand Bride, and the Möbius Prix Nordic winning cinematic installation Obsession. She has held positions as a core member of the directory group of the neuroscience research project aivoAALTO at Aalto University (2010–14) and a director in the Crucible Studio, Department of Media, Aalto University (2014–17). As the leader of the research groups NeuroCine and Enactive Cinema, she has published on the topics of neurocinematics and enactive media. She has been honored with the titles of adjunct professor of new narrative media at the University of Lapland and Fellow for Life in the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image. Her Enactive Virtuality Lab at Tallinn University combines arts and sciences in order to explore the neural basis of co-presence in immersive environments.

Abstracts:

I will introduce my concept of enactive virtuality, associated with the idea of narratives as fundamental constructs of human mind. Inspired by the approach to enactive mind by Fransisco Varela and colleagues, the concept of enactive virtuality describes the experiencing mind as a dynamical system of body, brain, and the world. The epistemic triangulation is suggested as a means of translating the concept to practice.

While audiovisual narratives have been shown to elicit very similar physiological responses in different viewers, however, individual life experiences define how the story is interpreted by each. The approach of triadic epistemology, a combination of methods from arts, social sciences, and psychophysiology allows generating integrated knowledge about how different viewers experience particular narratives. The method builds on the fundamentally pragmatist idea that no two domains of knowledge are enough to explain each other, but a third is always required to provide the interpretative angle. Therefore, understanding narrative content needs to be analyzed not only based on subjective reports of the viewers, because that is not anchored to any overall understanding, but they also need to be related to a neurophysiological repertoire of experiences. Similarly, being able to describe the neural activity data collected during the viewing of a film, it is not enough to relate it only to subjective reports of the viewers, but the observations also need to be interpreted to conventions of narrative dramaturgy and filmmaking. A selection of cases are described to clarify the concept of enactive virtuality and the proposed triadic method.